The Concord Monitor (N.H.), April 29:
The professional football draft is under way. As with all things NFL, it’s a shiny spectacle with intriguing plotlines and twists. Breathless coverage makes it the sports equivalent of a soap opera, and dedicated fans devour and digest each selection. They cheer, groan and taunt as if one pick alone will determine a team’s fate for the next season and beyond.
Over the three days of coverage, commentators will talk about spectacular first-round busts (remember Ryan Leaf?) and late-ound steals (Tom Brady in the sixth?) in league history. They will share tales of old gridiron gladiators and their on-field heroism, and suggest that any of the names now being read by Roger Goodell or some other league executive could soon be part of the lore. Thread after mythical thread will be woven into the sport’s narrative tapestry. There will be little room for talk of concussions or domestic assault, bogus scandals or rampant greed.
A war on football is warranted – not to destroy the game but to crack its veneer. The warrior tales told and retold to exalt the sport too often glorify the human cost – the life-destroying price paid by brain-damaged and hobbled athletes.
Most fans of the game are aware of the concussions, but that hasn’t kept them from buying tickets or watching games on TV. Fox, for example, drew an average of nearly 21 million viewers across its slate of games. The network told Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated that its most watched NFL seasons have all come in the past seven years. The story is similar for the other networks that air NFL games. What does the NFL receive from the networks, combined, for granting them the privilege of broadcasting games? About $3.1 billion a year.
The players get paid, too, and handsomely – although the paycheck is hard-won.
Last season, according to PBS’s Frontline, NFL players suffered a combined 271 concussions in practices, preseason games and regular season games, a nearly 32 percent increase over the 2014 season. The list of deceased former players diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease linked to concussions, is growing, too: Ken Stabler, Frank Gifford, Junior Seau, Mike Webster, Earl Morrall, Ralph Wenzel and Dave Duerson are among them. The list will keep growing.
Thurman Thomas, a gifted running back with the Buffalo Bills who played 13 seasons in the NFL, seems destined to join them. Not yet 50, Thomas battles mood swings and memory loss. He recently had to pull over on the highway to call his wife, he told CBSSports.com, because he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. Sadly, the story is becoming a common one among former players.
It’s hard to imagine things will get better soon, even with improved padding and concussion protocols, because players keep getting bigger and faster. An NPR report from 2013 determined that in the earliest years of the NFL, the average lineman was 6 feet tall and 190 pounds, and they made tackles with about 970 pounds of force. Linemen now average 6 feet, 5 inches and 310 pounds, and can unleash approximately 1,700 pounds of force. Every hit, as running back Reggie Bush said, is like a car crash.
We expect that the NFL will continue to do what’s best for the brand even as former greats like Thomas suffer as they fade. It’s a business. But more and more fans are bound to feel like Deitsch, of Sports Illustrated, who wrote: “I felt both enthralled and guilty at the same time as I watched the carnage in front of me. I wanted to look away. I could not look away.” Eventually, fans will look away – or threaten to. Then and only then will the league truly do all it can to protect and care for the men who battle on the field of play.
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